“My Spanish” reflects on Lozada-Oliva’s relationship with the language as she grows up, and as someone in a similar situation as the author, the opening and closing stanzas stood out to me the most, especially “…my Spanish is an itchy phantom limb. / It is reaching for words / and only finding air” (2-4). Though my parents spoke almost exclusively with me in Spanish when I was young, I switched to English soon after beginning school and began to lose my familiarity with Spanish, something I initially regarded as unimportant since we would only speak it at home. As I grew older my inability to connect with my relatives in Mexico pushed me to relearn the language, though I found that I was missing the ease with which I once communicated, and every sentence was a struggle to form in time to keep a conversation⁠—this in turn resulted in me speaking less in Spanish when I could, despite knowing that practice would only improve my fluency, because I felt that sticking with English was easier.

Though I knew that my parents had undoubtedly struggled with the same thing when learning English, it wasn’t until much later that I realized how much effort they had to put in on a daily basis. The end of the ninth and tenth stanzas, where Lozada-Oliva questions their identity as Americans, and then comments on her parents’ accents, also resonated with me for this reason. In an English-speaking country where an accent can be associated with status, I felt a bit sad to think I was so willing to let go of my heritage and my closeness with extended family in favour of what I used to perceive as the more important or relevant language⁠.